Smart phones are now capable of fast, accurate, dictation style speech recognition using an external server. The service is offered for free by several vendors. When coupled with basic natural language understanding and temporal and spatial awareness, we have a new, exciting channel for ecommerce. Products are already on the market, e.g., Apple's Siri virtual personal assistant (VPA), that ‘know’ the user and allow instant access to information and can handle transactions without dialing a number or entering a URL. The scope of activities possible is only limited by the availability of data in a format that machines can understand, i.e., the semantic web.
A transaction undertaken on a smart phone using a VPA has much in common with transactions offered over standard phones, both mobile and landline, using Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems. Due to the limited screen size of a smart phone, the choices presented to the user at any point are limited, resulting in a serial process flow. Input is limited to relatively short strings, either spoken or typed. Users are more likely to undertake such transaction using a smart phone when it is through a VPA as many parts (e.g., names, locations, and preferences) can be supplied by the phone independently. The introduction and rapid acceptance of a Virtual Personal Assistances (VPA) product, such as Apple iPhone 4S with Siri, suggests that more such products will appear and the scope of transactions that they can handle will increase rapidly.
What is required is a system and method that will enable existing IVR systems to interact with VPAs.